#this is very sad but im also v proud of it adn jun continues to compete for my fave character JUUUUUUUUN

[moon-yeongjun]

No Miracles || Mu Jun

Summary: April 27, in the middle of the night -- The Baes come to support the Moons at the hospital. In his desperation, Jun turns to Marlin’s magic 

tw: talk of death, cancer 

@baenxietydad

Read in order:  After the Kiss / Unanswered Texts Waiting Game / Snowstorm One Phone Call / Namtae 

JUN:  The Moons had returned to the hospital and this time, when they left, they would not be the same.    When Jun had received the call that Eomma had to take Abeoji to the hospital in the middle of the night, his three sisters in tow (for Jun was in Coventry and couldn’t watch them), he’d known this was the end. He comforted Eomma and lied to her as if it would not be. But for a long time, Abeoji had been too weak and an infection would spell disaster. And finally it happened-- a cold ballooning too quickly into pneumonia, and now Abeoji couldn’t breathe on his own, and intubating him meant more exposure to infection--   A hospital visit for a terminal cancer patient was like driving directly into the arms of death. Medicine didn’t work miracles. Medicine, sometimes, was the domino knocked over. No matter what doctors tried to do, they fought against a more powerful enemy and with every preventative measure, the doctors, not the disease, risked killing Abeoji in a different way.    Medicine, in other words, was about managing death, not stopping it.    When Jun arrived at the hospital himself the next evening, with Tae trailing behind him, it took him one conversation with the doctor to know all his worst fears would be realized. And so the hours dragged on, Abeoji clinging to life by the tubes they’d forced into him. He would never come off them.   Jun didn’t cry though. He comforted his three sisters. He held Eomma. He squeezed Tae’s shoulder. When the doctors came, Jun was the one who rose from the chair to talk to them, having the most background to translate what they said to his family and wanting it to be him.    At one point, Jun abruptly excused himself to the bathroom, feeling a random seizure of nausea. He stampeded into the bathroom and flung the seat of the toilet up. He coughed, larynx spasming, but nothing came up and the next moment, the sensation had left him. He went to the faucet, splashing water on his face and thinking: he is going to die. He is going to die. He will die.    He had to prepare himself, it couldn’t be a surprise.    What wasn’t a surprise was when the Baes showed up, called by a distraught Tae. His brother had remained strong for hours. He hadn’t cried, simply clenched his fingers into fists. But when Nemo was there, Tae started crying in earnest, the sort of wild, hysteric sobs that were hard to listen to. Jun could not bear to listen to them, and suddenly He is going to die felt impossible-- how could he let his appa die, how--   His hand found Mu-yeol’s arm and he pulled him away from everyone else.    “Hyung,” he uttered, still gripping his arm. “Hyung, tell me about your healing magic.”   

MARLIN:   He should have known that the first time Jun actually asked about his magic, not just sat there and listened to information he didn’t ask for while drunk, would be now. A part of him told himself that he and Nemo were only there for Tae but it was clear that not even Jun could perfectly seal away his own emotions. Jun prided himself on being logical but he was not a machine at the end of the day.    “Jun…” Mu-yeol said, gently touching Jun’s cheek. “There’s nothing I can do, Junnie. You know that.”   “Even I can’t play god.”

  JUN:  Jun flinched from Mu-yeol’s touch.   He didn’t need that. He wasn’t asking for comfort. He was fine. He had lost his true abeoji over a decade ago when his hal-abeoji passed away in South Korea and Jun had been unable to attend his funeral. He cried then, for that man, who read to him and played football with him and taught him how to brew a real cup of tea.    But he had to spare Eomma more pain. He must protect Tae and his sisters. They were all so young. His sisters were his age when hal-abeoji passed-- he couldn’t let these endless cycles repeat themselves. They could not grow up to be like him.    “I didn’t ask you to,” Jun responded, his tone hard. “Besides, that must be wrong. You can’t cure him, but surely. There’s something. There must be, that’s the point of someone like you. Why would your lot always be pressing to bring their craft into hospitals if there wasn’t, eh?” He felt like a crazy person, his mouth disconnected from his brain, because when would Jun ever advocate for a fairy to touch his father with untested magic--?   But here he was.   “Listen. He has a fever. He’s developed lung abscesses,” Jun recited as though he were reading his abeoji’s chart. “You can fix one of those things, you must be able to.”  

  MARLIN:   Had he not known Jun, ‘someone like you’ and ‘your lot’ would have been borderline jabs. But this was Jun, the boy that wanted his mother to have a local friend so he didn’t tell her that he was a fairy. Jun was a good person, he was just hurting.    You can fix one of those things, you must be able to.    Mu-yeol laughed bitterly to himself. “I can make him comfortable.” A beat. “And, actually, eliminate the fever. Fevers are nothing for a healing talent.”   “Getting rid of lung abscesses would require more magic than I could do discreetly. And it is dangerous - for me, not him - to attempt alone.” He explained. “Healing talents do the more difficult, complicated things in groups.”  

JUN:  Eliminate the fever.   Jun didn’t need to hear anything else.    Well. He did. And he listened. And as he listened, the gears of his brain began to twist, trying to work out how he could sneak a whole crew of fairies into his abeoji’s room undetected by the doctors, by his own family. Or perhaps it would be easier to sneak Abeoji out--    He caught himself at this half-formed, far-flung fantasy and knew that it was illegal-- and more importantly, impossible. He couldn’t move his abeoji, his abeoji could not breathe on his own, and he could not sneak a whole hoard of fairies in here, though he was almost desperate enough to try.    “Then will you do it?” Jun said after a single second pause. His eyes darted up. He’d been looking at his own hands. “Hyung, please. Whatever you can do. He-- my sisters and my brother are too young.” 

  MARLIN:   He checked over his shoulder for Eun-jung before he answered.    God, is this what he looked like as So-yeon died in his arms, as he clutched her and tried to heal her even after it was just an uninhabited body he was holding? It was pitiful and nothing like Jun to act this way. That’s what love and grief did when they met.   “Eo. If you can sneak me in there, not being family and all. But, you need to understand.” Mu-yeol lowered his voice. “I said I can get rid of the fever. Not make him live any longer. I could feel it for so long, Jun, and I mean physically, actually, feel it.”

  JUN:  “I know,” Jun said, his voice tighter and weaker than he’d like.   He did not have to be told that his abeoji would die. He had been the one to know first. When he arrived in November, he’d talked with the doctors. They gave him six months, maybe longer, but not much. Here they were-- six months later. It made him want to laugh bitterly. It was just hilarious. Medicine could predict death like the weather, but it could do nothing else.    He had been the one to tell his eomma and siblings that the cancer was terminal and that they should not hope for miracles. That was Jun’s job.   Jun didn’t need-- another doctor telling him this. He didn’t need a sparrow man telling him that even magic, in all its strange and miraculous and dangerous power, did not want to save his abeoji. It didn’t choose him. Instead, it damned him. For what, eh? Why Moon Yeong-seok? He’d been a good husband and a good father and a good businessman. He made sacrifices. He worked seven days a week with only Easter and Christmas and Chuseok taken off.    Maybe that was what killed him. Jun wanted to laugh again.    He didn’t laugh though. He’d laugh later, once again hiding in the bathroom, and there he would laugh hysterically until he couldn’t breathe and tears streamed down his face. Right now, he swallowed. “Just. Get rid of the fever. Do what you can, like you said, make him comfortable--” his voice suddenly caught and broke.    He breathed in sharply. His eyes were still dry.    “It-- your magic won’t-- will he feel it?”  

  MARLIN:   Jun didn’t deserve this. Eun-jung didn’t deserve to be left alone with five children. Yeong-seok, despite how Marlin knew how he felt about even light magicks like fairies, didn’t deserve to die like this.    For the sake of the fragile friendship he had with the Moons, he had to do what he could to ease his pain in his final hours. He was a good man, even if Mu-yeol wished he could bring himself to think differently. After all, he had to cover his ears and then lay human around him. He should hate him for his views on fairies, on fae.    He didn’t.    He couldn’t.    “It won’t hurt. Maybe he’d feel a warm tingling sensation as it worked on him, but I’m sure they have him on so many medications right now...he’s probably too out of it to notice.”   A beat. “Jun, do the pain medications actually work? As — as my wife was dying, even though I couldn’t save her, I was able to take the pain away. If the medication isn’t enough I could do that too.”

  JUN:  Pain was as mysterious as magic to a doctor. There was an entire branch dedicated to it in the practice of medicine. Doctors, specialists, psychotherapists, physical therapists, nurses, dentists… many hands concerned with pain, but none who knew how to truly prevent it or take it away. Pain was of course a necessary function of the body, but still, humans fought against it. Loathed it. Feared it.    As a doctor, Jun had learned about different pain indexes. He had held many small hands when he worked in the family clinic, comforted the children who whimpered and begged for help. He could prescribe this or that, but even when a patient’s eyes milked over from the various drugs, you never knew. Pain made every person an island. You were never more alone.   Jun did not know how to speak, then, for his abeoji. He shouldn’t.    “I don’t know what you mean by-- take it away,” Jun said. “He’s on a high dose of oxycodone right now-- it blocks the pain receptors in the brain, so the pain is still there, it is just-- it’s like a shield. And it increases the release of dopamine, which helps a person relax.” It was strange to recite all of this, as if he was reporting to a teacher, or more likely, teaching a student. How bizarre that Mu-yeol knew nothing of these things and yet here Jun was, trusting him to put his hands on his abeoji.   But he’d do anything. Anything. 

  MARLIN:   “I mean I can make sure he doesn’t feel pain.” Mu-yeol said. “Maybe it would give him some clarity of mind to better hear anything you might want to say to him. Before you can’t.”   He bit his lip, worried that was a little too frank. But Jun did not like things sugarcoated.    “I know from experience that when you know it’s the last thing you’re going to say to someone, you’re your most honest. It won’t come out poetically like in the movies, but it is honest.”

  JUN:  There was nothing that Abeoji had to say to him. There was nothing that Jun had to say to his abeoji.   Yesterday night, their first night in the hospital, Yeong-seok had still been able to talk a little. He did say some good-byes then. Jun watched, standing with his hands behind him, as Eomma cried and his abeoji touched her cheek. He spoke in exhausted Korean to all of them. He told Sky to keep practicing the clarinet. He told Star to help their mother. He told Sun not to lose her sense of humour. He told Tae that he was proud of him for winning his championship.   To Jun, he thanked him for bringing Tae to his championship and he asked about the store.   Of course he asked about the store.   And then he told Jun to open the store.   Jun had stared blankly at Abeoji, and for a split second he’d pretended as though he just misheard him. Gently, he suggested to Abeoji that perhaps the store should remain closed. Firmly, Abeoji told him no. We do not close the store, he said.    So after a few hours of sleep in one of the chairs in the waiting room, Jun jerked awake and he went to the Moon Market at five like always, and he opened the store. He worked for nine hours and then closed it early, driving back to the hospital where his family still was. At this point, Abeoji was even worse than he’d been the night before, intubated, unable to talk on his own. Jun knew that if Abeoji could talk, he would have scolded Jun for leaving early. If he could talk right now? He would remind Jun to open the store.   Jun said none of this to Mu-yeol, simply nodded. “Yes, if you can, that-- my siblings would like that. Thank you, hyung.” He swallowed roughly and nodded a second time. He blinked a few times as though there were tears, but his eyes were painfully, painfully dry.